Turkish presidential candidate quits race after release of alleged deepfake | Hacker News Reader

Turkish presidential candidate quits race after release of alleged deepfake

theguardian.com

80 pointsscandox86 comments

This is not Kemal Kilicdaroglu who is the main challenger to Erdoğan, and in fact could help his chances.

1. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/turkeys-erdogan-la...

notice the article claims the opposite

> The polling organisation Metropoll predicted late last month that İnce voters would predominantly give their votes to Erdoğan’s AKP, the CHP, with some also going to the far-right Nationalist Movement party and the nationalist IYI (Good party) in the parliamentary race.

polls are all over the place for this election, other than telling that it will be contested.

https://twitter.com/ozersencar1/status/1652771126714482689?s...

I had to read that sentence thrice but I don't think it's in conflict with op.

The Guardian is suggesting Ince's votes will be split between the main contenders. Then KK who is in the lead will have a higher chance of clearing 50%.

> the CHP

This is Kilicdaroglu's party. Also remember that there can be a runoff election, either candidate only needs to clear 50%

That may be poorly phrased way of saying, "people will vote for someone else". Erdogan (AKP) polls around 46%. K10u (CHP) polls around 50%. Ince was (2018) previously the CHP candidate in 2018.

I don't know anything about Turkey but unless Ogan's platform was "Erdogan isn't doing enough dictating", it's hard to picture his voters all going to AKP.

Al Jazeera says the opposite, his voters are closer to Erdoğan.

No. He used to be in the CHP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muharrem_%C4%B0nce

You're right I actually misunderstood the news piece from Al Jazeera.

For context, The Economist calls this the most important election in the world this year. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/05/04/if-turkey-sacks...

Who controls Turkey/the Bosphorus is critically important this year. The election (and attracted shenanigans) is only a piece of that

As an American who has spent years living in Turkey, I agree with that article, at least from an American or "Western" perspective.

Hilariously the Turkish diaspora living across Europe will be voting for Erdogan.

There was no "deepfake". There wasn't even a badly photoshopped picture. Someone took a screenshot from a pornographic film where the actor bears a resemblance to him (albeit faintly), and then released it from a Twitter account belonging to an impersonator of an insider. He quit the race for two reasons 1) His predicted vote count was decreasing a lot, he lost a lot of support 2) There was a lot of pressure from the opposition. He knew that if Erdogan won, millions of people would blame him and his political career would be over.

Just so the relevance here is clear. He claims it is a deep fake.

Then why quit the race if he thinks it's fake?

He can't win and a vote for him helps Erdogan.

"İnce had a small spike in popularity in the polls in which he peaked at roughly 10% of the overall vote share and more recently dropped down to almost 2% in some polls. While İnce had long seemed unlikely to win, his dwindling vote share was still enough to ensure that the presidential race would go to a runoff, a scenario observers believe could favour Erdoğan."

There seems to be an obvious answer...

Soon everything will be deep fake regardless of being deep fake and we all will just have to believe or not.

To me that's the interest of the story. First sighting for me.

You may find these antics of Elon Musk's lawyers even more interesting then, as posted a few days ago on HN, where they tried to claim (the judge wasn't having any of it) that since any video of Musk could have been deep faked that any video of him shouldn't be accepted by the court.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35862753

If Trump ever shows up in a video speaking coherently you know it's a fake.

Thanks - I've turned the alleged sex tape into an alleged deepfake in the title above.

It means basically the same thing but with less linkbait. Win.

> The former school headteacher and longtime member of the Republican People’s party (CHP) said an alleged sex tape circulating online was a deepfake, using footage taken from “an Israeli porn site”.

This seems pretty easy to determine then. Surely someone will recognize the original video, if it came from a publicly available source like that?

This seems like an impossible task. I can’t fathom recognising a video and finding the original. And yet, there seem to be people on Reddit capable of doing this. I feel like this candidate need only ask for help from Reddit to recover from this setback … if what he says is true.

Like you suggest, impossible for a single person, but almost trivial when you crowdsource it.

This improves the chance of Erdogan's main opponent winning the election because opposition votes won't be split across multiple candidates.

So despite the weird sex tape business, this is a positive event if you think Turkey should move forward from the authoritarianism and incompetent economic management of the Erdogan era.

Other people are saying his voters are more likely to split towards Erdogan. Which is it?

All I know is that the bond market thinks it’s a positive sign, and foreign investors aren’t rooting for Erdogan:

”Investors reacted positively to both the new polls and İnce’s withdrawal from the race, pushing the price of Turkey’s international bonds higher. A US dollar-denominated bond maturing in 2030 was trading on Thursday with a yield of 8.54 per cent, down from about 9.2 per cent at the start of the week.

”Bond yields fall when prices rise. The cost of protecting against a default on Turkish debt also declined, with the spread on five-year credit default swaps falling to 490 basis points from above 550 bps earlier this month, according to Bloomberg data. The spread had risen as high as almost 900 bps last summer.”

(Financial Times)

What should be our takeaway from the fact that foreign capitalists don’t like Erdoğan?

Someone can be a totally awful authoritarian bad leader and be hated by (presumably also totally awful) foreign capitalists. That's a thing.

It’s not like or dislike, they’re betting on the economic future of Türkiye - and their bet, with their money on the line, is that Erdoğan is bad for Türkiye.

I'd say they're betting on their possibility to extract wealth from Turkey, and their bet, with their money on the line, is that Erdogan is bad for their possibility to extract wealth from Turkye.

We are not talking about imperialist sources trying to colonize a nation. Capitalism has its shortcomings, which can surely be discussed, but it isn't an evil plan to reallocate the most resources from a zero-sum game to the "foreign capitalists".

Of course not. We are talking about possibility to have businesses who will mostly employ local workers and mostly use local resources, some will maybe even pay fair local taxes, but whose majority of profits will move out of the country. Thus, wealth extraction.

This is not extraction. If they pay wages, this is profit sharing. At best you can argue that they should share more with locals.

Nope. Profit is what remains after wages and any other expenses, and is shared between owners or shareholders.

When they bet on bonds, they essentially bet on the government not to default. When they bet against bonds, they expect a sovereign default, which would be terrible for everyone involved.

Yeah but you’d be wrong. The “foreign capitalists” are betting on Turkiye but mostly betting against other “foreign capitalists”.

That it's irrelevant? What matters is why they don't like him (obviously you can agree on specific things with people you otherwise heavily dislike), and in this case it's because he's pursuing an economic policy that hurts pretty much everyone, domestic citizens and foreign investors alike. Foreign capitalists and foreign left-wingers both dislike Erdogan and dislike eachother - trying to gain meaningful takeaways from who specifically does and doesn't like someone else is probably not wildly helpful

Only if you assume that the capitalists are being honest about why they don’t dislike him.

I mean, the reason is that they want to make money, that doesn't seem particularly out of character. It just so happens that the inflationary policies that are making it hard for them to make money are also making it hard for everyday folk domestically. If that wasn't the case then there wouldn't be that alignment between normally opposed groups.

The likeliest answer is that it's too hard to tell - it's too small of a populace (1-2% or less likely) that's hard to reach in an unbiased way to sample properly for a poll (without it getting expensive, I guess). People are mostly speculating based on his attitudes and positions.

> this is a positive event if you think Turkey should move forward from the authoritarianism and incompetent economic management

Forward may very well be more of the same or worse. Only time will tell if their system is systemically and irrevocably broken.

What makes you think it may be irrevocably broken? Worth noting that unlike, say, the USA, Turkey does not have a constitution that was written two hundred plus years ago and is virtually impossible to change or update.

There’s been 5 amendments to the US constitution since 1960. In 1971 it took 100 days to pass the 26th amendment lowering voting age to 18.

The largest barrier is it doesn’t have that many rules people want to change. It’s a short document and many things like requiring the president to be 35 just don’t come up very frequently. The few things that apply frequently such as free speech have broad support.

> In 1971 it took 100 days to pass the 26th amendment lowering voting age to 18.

I was taught in history class that this was rushed so quickly because congress thought it would reduce the number of student protests.

> Worth noting that unlike, say, the USA, Turkey does not have a constitution that was written two hundred plus years ago and is virtually impossible to change or update.

That’s a feature, not a bug. It’s what keeps the USA from devolving to the 51% mob rule flavor of the month after each election.

Many countries update their constitutions much more regularly and don't have that sort of thing happen to them. Why do you think the US would be any different?

The US has a large number of fairly undemocratic institutions such as Congress (supremely gerrymandered in many states), the electoral college (frequently favors the person who lost the popular vote) and the Senate (which rewards the same number of reps to 39,000,000 people as it does to 500,000 people).

These institutions offer routes for extremist positions to take power which they could then entrench with a more malleable constitution.

These "undemocratic" institutions only exist precisely because the constitution is hard to change. The electoral college, the gerrymandering, the shape of the Senate, they are all things that the constitution already allows. The takeover of power has already happened, the US is trapped in a 2-party system that basically everybody hates, but it's so entrenched into the culture that it's unthinkable to change it.

The 2 party system’s okay. It’s not the worst when it’s working alright. Right now it’s not great lol.

But this system has survived 227 years or so for a reason.

At the end of the day the Senate was actually a bulwark against extremism in these last elections in many ways.

I’m not sure what you mean by takeover of power as if there’s some sort of cabal out there. There’s a lot of different vying interests out there and some have more power than they should, and this isn’t our shiningest moment in general, but I don’t necessarily agree that there’s been some sort of “takeover”.

> 51% mob rule

How is this distinguishable from democracy?

The US is not a pure democracy.

The question is about the purpose of framing "51% mob rule" as something other than democracy.

It's hard to put my finger on the problem. Speaking generally and in only my opinion, Turks have a general lack of faith in any public system. The court system has barely worked, the parliamentary system was recently crippled.

I could go on, but to keep this short it's not clear that there is a cohesive political will to move toward a rule by system rather than rule by person. There is a large segment of the population willing to vote for a personality and an astonishing tolerance for key personnel to be changed when the new person is voted in.

Consider that their economy is going to break (further) no matter which candidate gets chosen and there will be little room for improvement.

To be fair, having a constitution that’s nearly impossible to change or update may be helpful during years when authoritarians are in power.

To be fair, any authoritarian worth worrying about will either simply not care or secretly staff Congress and the courts with sympathizers who will do a Palpatine and "make it legal."

The Constitution is just a piece of paper. Its only power lies in the willingness of people to believe in the political fiction that is "law." Trump is the closest the US has come to a truly dangerous authoritarian so far, but he wasn't competent enough to get his shit together and really take over. But he could have. He had millions of people convinced the Democrats were involved in an international communist conspiracy to steal the election. People within the government and military leadership openly espousing their support for a coup. Support within law enforcement. Half the country willing to ride or die for him.

And ironically his greatest success in terms of forcing his political agenda was completely legal - stacking the Supreme Court with ideologues. Doesn't really matter how hard the Constitution is to change when nine unelected people with lifetime appointments can just decide what it means.

> The high-profile deployment of deepfake videos has already hit Turkey’s 45-day election cycle, after Erdoğan played an alleged deepfake that claimed to show banned Kurdish militants declaring their support for Kılıçdaroğlu at a pre-election rally last weekend

This could be the first election results secured through using deep fakes.

Hilariously, those are the four parties. This sentence claims the voters will predominantly give their votes to one of the other parties.

they are sort ordered by popularity, but yeah that is a terribly unclear sentence

https://twitter.com/ozersencar1/status/1652771126714482689?s...

Prety hard to be wrong on a "prediction" like that

man... the guardian writer who came up with this sub-title:

>> Muharrem İnce pulls out just days from close election race saying alleged sex tape is deepfake

Friend of the subeditor who came up with "6,000 RIM jobs on the line".

It seems Kemal Kilicdaroglu (the main opposition candidate) is accusing Russians for the deepfake video.

He tweeted in Turkish and Russian https://twitter.com/kilicdarogluk/status/1656705798557384727

Isn't less fragmented votes a worse situation for Erdogan?

Yes. There are two kinds of people, Erdogan voters and "Not Erdogan" voters. If the latter has less too choose from, that's not good for Erdogan.

It has nothing to do with a sex tape. There was an allegation, but generally speaking it is a strategic move to get more votes for Kılıçdaroğlu

well, he probably would get less than 5%, so I don't think effect the elections much. but the main candidate KK supporters was blaming that guy about: if they lose elections against erdogan, it will be because of that guy.

so now, they can get full responsibility if they lose against erdogan :) but if KK wants to take any responsibility he shouldn't be candidate. he already lost 8 elections against erdogan...

I wonder if it was a deep fake

We gonna need to see that tape

I miss those days here in the US were somekind of sexual impropriety would end someone's political career.

Now it seems, at least for one US Political Party, sexual impropriety is a requirement to be considered for higher office.

If true, the guy just had sex, and someone filmed it, how is that impropriety? Make love not war

> I miss those days here in the US were somekind of sexual impropriety would end someone's political career.

Who cares, as long as sex is consensual? Seriously, what’s wrong with having sex? The fact that a political career can be ended because someone made a fake video is much more troubling.

I’m not American, but I am glad we just shrug when we learn about a famous politician’s lover. People are not going to stop fucking. The more we accept that the better, at least then it cannot be used for blackmail or coercion.

I assumed this referring to the recent Trump case, so it is actually about sexual abuse.

In Trump’s case, it was way more than “impropriety”. I took it as referring to the Turkish politician’s case, where no rape, harassment, or assault is credibly alleged. Abuse is a different thing entirely, but affairs are not abuse per se.

I see where you're coming from but we've had a lot of politicians over the last several years implicated in some pretty bad stuff. From sexual harassment to sex trafficking.

True. Harassment, rape, and non-consensual sex in general is terrible and should be punished. And we should certainly not elect criminals. Impunity is destroying trust in the state and the government. If you think the US have it bad, have a loony at the recent history in the uk. This is utterly appalling.

This is a bit different, though. Having an affair is not a crime and should not be. Not having an affair but having opponents making up fake documents is even worse.

I think the issue isn’t the sex, but the circumstances surrounding it. Such as infidelity or exploitative power dynamics.

In case of Turkish politicians, they are all claiming to be following the religion of Islam and it is forbidden to have non-marital sex in Islam religion.

Such tapes can definitely end someones political career very swiftly in Türkiye.

Unfortunately, someone claiming not to be following Islam religion is not going to be elected at all, but maybe this will change into the future, so that religion stops being criteria to be elected.

Maybe one day...

> In case of Turkish politicians, they are all claiming to be following the religion of Islam and it is forbidden to have non-marital sex in Islam religion.

So they have something in common with holier-than-thou republican hypocrites. And many others around the world, this attitude is not uniquely Turkish or American.

> Such tapes can definitely end someones political career very swiftly in Türkiye.

In some presumably-liberal western countries as well, unfortunately.

> Maybe one day...

I really hope so. For the sake of everyone living there.

Also wouldn't this technically be considered revenge porn under current US law?

Imagine coming in 2023 to an American site and telling people to have any sort of moral standards, like not having extra-marital sex. What a sucker.

Such a day never existed in the US

There was Gary Hart who had to withdraw in 1976 (IIRC) due to just a rumored affair. I think things would be much different if he had won.

Now, just a "regular" affair is not even news worthy, to be news worthy, somekind of abuse needs to be attached to the activity. And that does not cause any harm to the candidate, especially if a member of the GOP.

Ah, the good ol days of sex scandals in America - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gczkM8cL2hs

I miss those days we could talk about Turkish politics without someone forcibly injecting completely unrelated US politics in to it for no apparent reason what-so-ever.

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